We love that so many in our Plaine Products community want to return their bottles for reuse. The return rate of our bottles that get sent back for us to reuse and refill is fantastic – 70-80%! But we can’t always reuse the bottles. Sad, we know.
Given the zealousness of our community’s desire to reuse and refill with us, we wanted to share a few examples of when NOT to send your bottles back to us. Why don’t we want you to return these types of bottles? Unfortunately, we can’t reuse every bottle. And if we can’t reuse it, we recycle it. Why not just recycle it at home instead of sending it back to us? By not sending back unusable bottles you are helping to decrease our carbon footprint and our shipping costs.
4 Reasons you SHOULD NOT send back a bottle
Large Dents
If your bottle has large dents, we can’t use that for the next customer, so please recycle at home. Large dents like these make the bottles unsuitable for reusing and refilling. Also, this box could have been reused but product leaked all over it. Did you know that we reuse our boxes as well?! When returning your bottles please be sure that they are rinsed and dried with the lids securely tightened.
Hard Water Spots
If your bottle has hard water spots and stains, don’t send it back to us. Just put it in your own recycling bin at home. Our warehouse manager, Chris explains, “I’m a bottle washer, not a miracle worker. Heavy soap deposits and especially hard water spots are hard or impossible to clean. These will likely be pulled off the washing line and sent directly to the aluminum recycler.” If anyone has suggestions on how to remove hard water stains let us know!
Mold and Other Funkiness
If the bottom of the bottle gets dirty or funky like this because you’ve had it for a while, please recycle it at home. Basically, if you wouldn’t want to receive a bottle back that looks like what you are about to send back to us – recycle it instead!
Other Companies’ Bottles
Please don’t send us other companies’ bottles. We’re just going to recycle them, so no need to ship them all the way here when you can recycle them at home. BUT consider sending that company a message encouraging them to adopt a refill model like ours.
Even though we can’t reuse these types of bottles, aluminum is infinitely recyclable, so recycle it at home knowing it will stay out of the waste stream. And don’t let that stop you from ordering your Plaine Products refill, you can just skip the return label!
